Raymond Carver

I made a wasteland of everything I touched.

Peter Everwine

Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.

Albert Camus

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

Stanley Kunitz

What other morality has the artist but to endure? The only ones who survive, I think, beyond the equally destructive temptations of self-praise and self-pity, are those whose discontent is with themselves. The fiercest hearts are in love with a wild perfection.

Cormac McCarthy

All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain.

Graham Greene

One has no talent. I have no talent. It's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time.

Edmund Burke

All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.

Sophocles

It is the dead
Not the living who make the longest demands
We die forever

Kurt Vonnegut

There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind.

Paul Valéry

Sometimes something wants to be said, sometimes a way of saying wants to be used.

Clive James

A man looking for oblivion should be allowed to have it.

Jim Harrison

What cannot be said will get wept.

Thomas Hardy

Life may be sad past saying...

Sonny Sharrock

I've been trying to find a way for the terror and the beauty to live together in one song. I know it's possible.

Dante Alighieri

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood,
For I had lost the right path.

John Blair, "Cicada"

Yes, the first knowledge that counts is that everything stops.

Philip Larkin

An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never

W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Jorge Luis Borges

I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library.

Henri Poincaré

Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.

John Stuart Mill

A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.

William Shakespeare

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,
And thou no breath at all?

Mario Savio

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop.

Elvin Jones

You gotta be willin’ to die with the motherfucker.

Philip Roth

It was the interest in life and the attempt to get life down on the page that made me a writer—and then I discovered that, in many ways, I am standing on the outside of life.

Unknown Author

Oh, Death, thou comest when I had thee least in mind.

E.L. Doctorow

The book is written in silence and read in silence, and goes from heart to heart and soul to soul like nothing else can.

Ron Slate

          ...we lived
in this world, but what were we like?

Tom Stoppard

It's the wanting to know that makes us matter.

Arthur Rimbaud

What will become of the world when you leave? No matter what happens, no trace of you now will remain.

Albert Camus

There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.

Larry Levis

Time swarms around me with its presences.

Robert Hass

I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness

Sonya Chung

It's all sort of wrong, we make art as a way of managing all that wrong, as a way of surviving it and keeping on towards beauty.

Larry Levis

I may not believe in the myth of the Fall, but it is still possible for me to feel fallen.

Harold Arlen

Music doesn't argue, discuss, or quarrel. It just breathes the air of freedom.

Rilke

Works of art are of an intimate loneliness. Only love can grip and fairly judge them. Consider yourself and your feeling right every time.

Philip Larkin

...we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Marcus Aurelius

Nothing is more beautiful than a word fitly spoken.

Ravi Coltrane

I always thought, If the plane starts going down, I'm going to put this on, because it's really the last thing I want to hear.

Hou Hsiao-hsien

What makes times "best" is that they're lost and gone: we'll never have them again.

Clifford Odets

[T]here is only shame and regret, resignation and anxiety.

C.G. Hanzlicek

...in the end, beyond the metaphors
We can't help loving life.

Robert Hass

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles the old thinking.

Edward Hirsch

Poetry is language in action against time, against death.

William Ramsay, Scottish Chemist

The noblest exercise of the mind within doors, and most befitting a person of quality, is study.

Sebastião Salgado

History is above all a succession of challenges, of repetitions, of preseverances. It's an endless cycle of oppressions, humiliations, and disasters, but also a testament to man's ability to survive.

Emiliano Zapata

I'd rather die on my feet than live my life on my knees.

Thomas Wolfe

The whole conviction of my life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, far from being a rare and curious phenomenon, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence.

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Leo Tolstoy

The equality of the capitalist and the laborer is the same as the equality of two fighters, when the hands of one are bound, while a gun is put into the hands of the other, and equal conditions are strictly observed for both in the fight.

George Steiner

It is not the literal past that rules us, but images of the past.

William Shakespeare

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.

Jaroslav Seifert

If an ordinary person is silent about the truth it may be a tactical maneuver. If a writer is silent he is lying.

George Saunders

There comes a phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

Jean-Paul Sartre

We are no longer with those who want to possess the world, but with those who want to change it, and it is to the very plan of changing it that it reveals the secrets of its being...

Jean-Paul Sartre

Things are entirely what they appear to be and behind them...there is nothing.

Saint John of The Cross

At the evening of our life, we will be judged on love.

Ned Rorem

The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake.

Joseph Roach

...memory operates as both quotation and invention, an improvisation on borrowed themes, with claims on the future as well as the past.

Rainer Maria Rilke

You must change your life.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Beauty is only
the first touch of terror
we can still bear...

Mordecai Richler

Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing, it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.

Spencer Reece

The ponies said: This day astounds us. The field is green.

Marcel Proust

Griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some of their power to injure our heart.

Sergio Pininfarina

Efficiency is also beauty.

Octavio Paz

...duro poco
y es enorme la noche.

Ovid

The lost hour never returns.

Beth Orton

Everything is sacred, and nothing is as sacred as we want it to be.

Gregory Orr

When Keats says that this world is not a vale of tears, as
religion misconceives it to be, but a vale of soul-making, I
believe him. I believe that an act of imagination is one of the
ways we make our souls, but it's a way surrounded by darkness
and fear.

Mary Oliver

...poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.

Nietzsche

Without music, life would be a mistake.

Vladimir Nabokov

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

W.S. Merwin

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle
Everything I do is stitched with its color

W.S. Merwin

What you do not have you find everywhere.

William Maxwell

In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we take.

Philip Larkin

What will survive of us is love.

Stanley Kunitz

What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.

Milan Kundera

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Milan Kundera

Most people deceive themselves with a pair of faiths: they believe in eternal memory (of people, things, deeds, nations) and in redressibility (of deeds, mistakes, sins, wrongs). Both are false faiths. In reality the opposite is true: everything will be forgotten and nothing will be redressed.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Jane Kenyon

There are things in this life that we must endure which are all but unendurable, and yet I find that there is a great goodness. Why, when there could have been nothing, is there something? This is a great mystery. How, when there could have been nothing, does it happen that there is love, kindness, beauty?

Kafka

A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Pauline Kael

If art isn't pleasure, what is it—work?

John 9:4

We must work...while it is day: night comes, when no one can work

Henry James

We work in the dark.

John Irving

Dr. Larch had pointed out that Melony had taken Jane Eyre with her; he accepted this as a hopeful sign—wherever Melony went , she would not be without guidance, she would not be without love, without faith; she had a good book with her. If only she'll keep reading it, and reading it, Larch thought.

Zbigniew Herbert

We are despite everything
The guardians of our brothers

C.G. Hanzlicek

If you want to say this life
Is merely the bridge
To the life we're asked to dream of,
You are my enemy.

C.G. Hanzlicek

…death will hold up a mirror
we are meant to measure our lives in.

Corrinne Clegg Hales

If you work fast, and have a strong stomach,
there's a chance
to do good in the world.

Goya

I've no more sight, no hand, nor pen, nor inkwell, I lack everything—all I've got left is will.

Gide

I love life passionately, but I don't trust it.

Paul Fussell

It takes some honesty, even if that honesty arises from despair, to perceive that some events, being inhuman, have no human meaning.

T.S. Eliot

You are the music while the music lasts.

James Dickey

The poet is not trying to tell the truth; he's trying to make it, and he tries to make a different version of it from the official version that God made or the world made.

Degas

We see what we want to see, and from this falsification comes art.

Colette

Who says you should be happy? Do your work.

Sonya Chung

I want this to be the year of finishing things.

Chekhov

The soul of another is wrapped in darkness.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. And as I think plots desirable and almost necessary, I have this extra grudge against life.

Montgomery "Monty" Burns

Push out the jive,
bring in the love.

Beethoven

Love demands everything, and that very justly.

Balzac

Behind every great fortune lies a crime.

Chomsky

Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.

Marcus Aurelius

In a man's life
his time is but a moment, his being a mere flux,
his senses a dim glimpse, his body food for the worms,
and his soul a restless eddy…
the things of the body pass like a flowing stream;
life is a brief sojourn;
and one's mark in this world
is soon forgotten.